Our Giro by The Cycling Podcast, stage six: The bonk!

Our Giro reaches Mount Etna for its first summit finish and, appropriately enough, the story of one of the Giro’s most famous explosions.

Call it a capitulation, a hunger flat, a bonk – cycling has as many terms for running out of fuel and hitting the wall as Eskimos have for ice. In 2002 Cadel Evans, the Australian former mountain biker taking part in his first Grand Tour, was in the pink jersey and only had one mountain to hang on.

Evans was riding for Mapei, the world’s best team, in what was, as we discussed in our stage four episode, a controversial, scandal-ridden Giro. In this episode we speak to Evans about his baptism of fire and about the stage when his body said ‘enough’ – he tells us what it was like to ride for Mapei, to have a teammate expelled after testing positive and to find himself in the lead so close to the finish.

Although Evans didn’t win, the experience did provide an important building block in a career that would see him win the Tour de France nine years later.

Amarcord is our daily visit to the vaults and in today’s we revisit Giromondo, an episode of Kilometre 0 from the first Giro we covered in full as The Cycling Podcast in 2016.